How to Survive Rev3, A Walkthrough Guide.

2010 is coming very close now, which means that the third revision of HWBOT is nearly ready to go online. This third revision does have a couple significant changes which might confuse some people. The overclocker and team rankings have changed a bit due to an updated HWBoints algorithm and the front-page of the website has been giving a new look as well. In this article, we will give you an introduction to the new features of Revision 3 as well as a quick HWBoints-guide.

1. Lay-out Changes

1.1 Basic frontpage look

First of all, I have to introduce you to our new Robot-friend to accompany you on your journey on this website. The most obvious change of lay-out is the main background color, which has been changed from white to a more blue-ish style. An important thing to note is that weâ€™ve maintained the overall look of the website, which means that there are no major hyperlink replacements. This should help you to get used to the site in no time. You can click on the image on your right-hand side to see more of the new lay-out.

1.2 Hardware product and manufacturer pages

As we now have two people working on the website, one full-time and one night-time, we quickly discovered that we do need backup from vendors in order to survive. As a result of this, we have already expanded our hardware database with mainboard products and manufacturer pages. In Rev3, both of these features will serve a more useful purpose: manufacturers who decide to support HWBOT will have a fully-adjustable manufacturer page on which they can, for instance, maintain a blog about upcoming products, upcoming competitions and overclocking records. The supporting manufacturers will be visually represented in the upper-right corner as you can see in the (clickable) picture on the right-hand side. Do note that the manufacturers in this picture are not in partnership as itâ€™s only to demo the functionality.

The first two manufacturers who are supporting HWBOT are GIGABYTE and MSI. We would like to thank both of them for the support!

As for the hardware product integration, Rev3 has been prepared to host overclocking rankings for mainboard or memory. This means that, for instance, we could install a ranking for highest achieved BCLK or memory frequency. As Iâ€™m writing this, the basic code still has to be uploaded to the test server, so we cannot show you a working application just yet. However, the current mainboard product pages already give a good indication of things might look.

1.3 Result details lay-out

At first I wasn’t going to include this section in this article, because there’s still a lot of finetuning left. However, since it’s also quite a change in comparison to Rev2, I believe it’s good to already have an idea of the general concept of the lay-out. What’s new:

Better overview of used hardware

Add a more enlarged personal ‘thanks-to’ note to the score

Possibility to give a certain score a thumbs-up

Possibility to start a discussion about the score

2. HWBoints algorithm

What most people are waiting for, of course, is the new HWBoints algorithm. In order to understand the changes applied to the algorithm, we need to go over a couple of basic HWBoint principles.

It’s our aim to make overclocking as accessible as possible, which means that the financial aspect of it should be as low as possible.

Our rankings should represent skill over any other factor in the overclocking game.

The method of calculating points should be as transparent as possible.

As revision 2 of the HWBoints was pushing the first two principles of HWBOT, we have changed the manner in which points are awarded to scores in order to adapt to the latest innovations in hardware technology. The basics are still the same, however, as there still are two types of points: global and hardware points. I will go over the changes in the next paragraphs, but do want to give you a small list of adjustments:

Global rankings have been split up based on #CPU/GPU instead of #Socket

Hardware points for non-popular hardware has been lowered, points for popular hardware increased

Amount of global rankings have been split into two

2.1 Overclockers League: Global points

The Overclockers League still mainly focuses on the position in the global rankings. So, your personal total will be the sum of all you global points and hardware points (limited to 300). The biggest change I have to make you aware of is that we have split up rankings based on #CPU_core or #GPU for certain applications.

All 3D benchmarks have been split up based on #GPU. This means: “1xGPU”, “2xGPU”, “3xGPU” or “4xGPU”.

Wprime 32M, Wprime 1024M and PCMark05 have been split up based on #CPU_core.

As the amount of global rankings increased dramatically, it was necessary to limit the amount of global points addressable to your personal total. So we opted for the easiest solution: only the best global score will be attributing points to your personal total. In this case, the definition of “best score” would be “the most rewarding score”, which means that not the highest score, or the highest ranked result, is attributing points, but the score that receives the most global points. An example:

Well, first of all it’s important to know that single GPU is very, very much rewarding which means that often you’ll find that it will be more beneficial to spend loads of time on a single GPU than on a 4xGPU configuration. Secondly, the global points of the scores that are not contributing to your personal total are still contributed to the team’s total, which means that benching in all categories can be very good for the team. Thirdly, you can actually jump in the Overclockers League without gaining any points: if your competitor gathers points from a different category you are gathering points from (egg: 2xGPU versus 1xGPU), you can make him lose points by beating him in his category. As popularity differs, you might not increase in points, but the other will most definitely lose points.

Calculating the points

Similar to Rev2, the global points are still calculated using the basic formula “base points x weight”. The weight is the most important factor and is affected by the parameters user and time.

User: the amount of unique participants

Time: over the last 12 months

In other words, the engine calculates the amount of unique participants over the last 12 months in each global ranking (ergo: 4 per 3D benchmark) to set the weight-factor. Also, we’ve increased the theoretical maximum amount of HWBoints per global ranking. We have also increased the maximum amount of global points per result.

2.2 Hardware Masters: hardware pointsIn contrary to the Overclockers League, the Hardware Masters fully focuses on the hardware points, which are distributed through the different hardware category rankings. The most important change in this section is that we’ve updated the algorithm to be more suitable for highly popular hardware categories. Whereas in Rev2 the maximum amount of hardware points per result was limited to 15, it is now 75 points! Although this may seem rather a lot, do take into account that this amount of points is only awarded when the hardware category reaches 400 unique participants. Being first out of 400 certainly should be rewarded!

Another change applied is that for very unpopular categories we have reduced the amount of hardware points to 1.5 points. The algorithm is also a bit less rewarding for being 2nd out of 2 participants; in other words: little competition means little reward.

Please note that the hardware points for multi-threaded applications have also been split up based on #CPU_core or #GPU.

2.3 Teams league

Although this ranking obviously is affected by both the updated global and hardware points algorithm, the calculation of the team points hasn’t been changed. In other words, the team points are still the sum of all the global points and all the hardware points gathered by the team members.

As there’s one small bug to squash, I cannot show you the correct team rankings right now. It will be visible when the test server is available for big public.

3. And much more

In the last couple of days of 2009, we are still working on a couple of features that are not functional on the test server just yet. In other words, this article only describes a part of the novelties that come with revision 3. One of the most cool work-in-progress features ought to be the new achievements:

As you can see, plenty of new stuff is coming with the new revision. Stay tuned for more information coming in the next couple of days. In case of questions regarding the new HWBoints-algorithm, just pose them in the thread linked to this article.